Changing Control OF Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil
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Description
To understand police violence and its control in Brazil requires some understanding of the contexts in which both occur. Brazil is thought to have the most pronounced income inequality in South America. Until the mid-eighties, it had one of the most durable military dictatorships in the hemisphere, lasting almost twenty years, although with a gradual easing (abertura) from the late seventies. The national government now is a democratic federal system, in which the states actually have more autonomy than the states in the US. The state of Sao Paulo is the industrial giant of Brazil, producing some fifty percent of the nation's manufactured goods as well as much of the agricultural product. Its stage of economic and social development is estimated to be like that of Mexico. The state has some thirty million people, of which nearly half are in the city's metropolitan area. Rio de Janeiro, both the state and the city, is much smaller. The political flavor of the governments of the two states is extremely different. Rio's governor until 1994, Leonel Brizola, a populist liberal, was driven from politics by the dictatorship but has returned to popularity since its demise. Those in charge of criminal justice under Brizola are people who protested the repression of the dictatorship; they proudly refer to themselves as “human rights militants.” Of course, they would at the same time like to make the city less crime ridden. In contrast, the governor of Sao Paulo at the time of this writing, Luiz Antonio Fleury, is a tough law-and-order prosecutor who was earlier trained as an officer in the police. He has tried to use the police as an instrument for the direct repression of crime. The police are organized on a statewide rather than municipal basis. (A small federal police fills a function analogous to that of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI.) The investigative/judicial police are called civil police; they are organized separately and stationed in different offices from the military police (PM), who do the patrol work. The latter are organized hierarchically, with a specially trained officer staff. They are not part of the military forces, although they were absorbed into them during the dictatorship. In 1987, 1991 and 1992, in the course of writing extended reports for Americas Watch (a non-governmental human rights organization) concerning police violence in the two states, I visited both cities collecting data, and I had an opportunity to observe changes during the intervening five years. At the time I started, the only relevant piece in English, I think, was Deborah Jakubs' in David Bayley's book. Although it was a fine piece, it was handicapped by the difficulty of fact-finding during the dictatorship. That difficulty has disappeared—the Sao Paulo military police now seem to me less secretive than, say, the New York police—but it suggests the aim of the present project. My principal problem is to understand how massive police abuses can prevail in a democratic society; a subsidiary problem is to understand the transition to democracy in the police—to see the aftereffects of dictatorship on police in a democracy. The abuses I concentrate on are the classic worst—coerced confessions and the misuse of deadly force.
Source Publication
Policing Change, Changing Police: International Perspectives
Source Editors/Authors
Otwin Marenin
Publication Date
1996
Recommended Citation
Chevigny, Paul G., "Changing Control OF Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil" (1996). Faculty Chapters. 1142.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1142
